Schmooze Season

We’ve already told you about our nifty marketing plan, our cool site design, and our recruitment strategy, but this week we put into play one of our most powerful business tools — the Schmooze Surge. After months staying cooped up in our Tongren Lu headquarters, we have emerged into the daylight and are starting a networking frenzy.

Key to our network marketing approach is chamber of commerce participation. In my old role running an entertainment magazine, we went to club launch parties and art exhibits. But those are not the type of events that industrial property folks generally frequent. Meetings like Lessons Learned Series: Dow Corning’s Siloxane Project, Zhangjiagang, are more our speed these days.

While the events may be different, and the faces a bit rounder and grayer, the routine remains the same. Shake hands, distribute name cards, practice smiling and holding your wine glass at the same time. I attended two chamber of commerce events this week, and after a few hundred more should have had a pretty good chance to tell the world about the wonders of RightSite.

Apart from attending cocktail parties and committee meetings, we managed to reach a few other milestones this week:

Tax Department Registration Completed — hooray! WE BUSTED THROUGH THE LAST BUREAUCRATIC BARRIER. With receiving our tax registration this week we are now certified to operate as a company, including setting up a bank account and billing our clients. We still will need about two weeks to receive the book of fapiaos (tax invoices) that we will need to bill our clients, but since the site is not even up yet, our ability to bill people is not a critical concern just yet.

Layout Design Completed — On Monday we approved a final version of our InterSite design, which marked the last of our layout tasks. Now we can concentrate on building the actual pages.

Development Server is Up — Now that we have started building the site, we have also begun to put some of the elements that have been built onto a development server for testing. This means that rather than looking at descriptions of how the site would work, or gazing at .jpg files of layouts, we actually have html pages on a server that we can click on and watch things happen. Not much to click on just yet, but that will all change next week.

What’s Coming Up

Here’s a quick preview of what we’ll be up to in the next 10 days

Looking for an office (still haven’t found a %$#@! place to call home)

Site translation — most of the translation is done automatically in Drupal, but we will still need to make manual alterations.

Static content creation — We need to start writing all those miscellaneous bits of the site such as help files, About Us, and all kinds of other miscellaneous content. Not that much writing, but we will be living with what we write for a long time, so it would be good to do a proper job of this

Bank account set up- Now that we have a company, we need a bank account, so getting this established will allow me to stop running the company out of my own pocket. (Even if the money still comes from the same place, the tax authorities prefer a bit more transparent way of running things).

Accounting system — with our new company we need to set up an accounting system. We have hired a company to assist with this, but someone still needs to tell them what to do.

Marketing materials — We have finalised a contract with Paper Stone Scissors to start creating all of the cool stuff that will help make our site famous. We promise to share examples of these fun items as they become available.

After reading this list, I realise that I had better stop blogging and get back to work. Enjoy your time, whatever you’re doing, and see you again soon on Mingtiandi.